Over at the Google Chrome Blog, the stable release of Sign in to Google was announced, and while the personalization features it introduces may seem minor, to those who don’t like working in different environments, getting used to someone else’s browser setup won’t be an issue. As the post indicates, the Chrome sign in allows users to “take your Chrome stuff with you, so you can always have your personal Chrome experience on all of your devices.”

The concept is simple, with a Google Chrome account activated on one device and you change something on the current device’s setup — that is, add a bookmark — the change is reflected on all other Chrome-enabled devices, provided the user is signed in when the change was made.

The Chrome sign in works if there’s a shared computer involved as well. Google’s post explains:

With today’s Stable channel release, you can now add new users to Chrome. Adding new users lets you each have your own personal Chrome experience, and lets you each sign in to Chrome to sync your stuff. To add a new user to Chrome, go to Options (Preferences on a Mac), click “Personal Stuff,” and click “Add new user.” Check out our latest Beta blog post for a few quick tips.

The steps for adding a new user are as follows:

1. Click the wrench icon on the browser toolbar.
2. Select Options (Preferences on Mac and Linux).
3. Click Personal Stuff.
4. In the “Users” section, click Add new user.
5. A new window for the user appears, with a special icon for the user in the top corner. Here, you can sign in to Chrome with a Google Account to associate the account with the user. Once signed in, all the bookmarks, apps, extensions, theme, and browser settings for the user will be synced to the account.

There’s also a video of the Sign in to Chrome in action:

Does this level of personalization apply to you? Is it a feature you could see yourself using? Let us know what you think.

Hunch has been around for a couple years now. The company’s stated mission is to “build a ‘taste graph’ of the entire web, connecting every person on the web with their affinity for anything, from books to electronic gadgets to fashion or vacation spots.”

Here’s a video that it explains what it’s about:

“We’ll be tackling all kinds of interesting challenges as part of eBay including predictive merchandising, interpreting unstructured data and creating merchant insights,” Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon says on the company’s blog.

“We are engaging consumers in innovative ways and attracting top technologists to shape the future of commerce,” said Mark Carges, eBay CTO and SVP, Global Products, Marketplaces. “With Hunch, we’re adding new capabilities to personalizing the shopping experience on eBay to the individual relevant tastes and interests of our customers. We expect Hunch’s technologies to benefit eBay shoppers as they browse and buy, and to bring sellers on eBay new ways to connect the right products with the right customers.”

Hunch.com will continue to operate as a standalone site, and the data that users have already shared will be governed by the company’s existing privacy policy.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Michael Arrington believes the price to be somewhere around $80 million.

“Groupon is constantly looking for new ways to bring its subscribers the best, most relevant deals in the places they like to spend time,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews.

“This new customization makes it easier than ever to discover the best deals (Types) in the spots subscribers want them (Places), every day of the week,” she adds.

“[It’s] a win-win for merchants and consumers – business owners reach most relevant and interested customers while shoppers get an even more personally-curated deal experience every day,” she says.

Types and Places are accessible from the user’s Groupon profile, as opposed to specific landing pages. There are over 25 different types of “Types”. This includes:

• Fresh Air – outdoor experiences
• Good for 2 – something for two people
• Will Call – ticketed event
• White Tablecloth – fine dining
• Pampered – spa/beauty
• Etc.

Every Groupon deal is labeled with one or more type (below the feature image on the deal page). Users tag deal types they’re interested in by clicking the heart icon next to the type. Users can add and remove types as they wish. As a user adds types, their “All Deals” page and daily emails are refreshed with matching deals.

Places are simply locations the user saves. You can add custom places to your profile to keep a list of the most relevant neighborhoods to your life. Deals are personalized to users’ pre-selected places. Daily emails and the “All Deals” page automatically feature deals in the user’s set Places when they’re available. Deals are labeled with proximity to users’ places.

The product is available in over 150 North American markets so far.

Have you tried Bing’s Adaptive Search? Let us know.

As Stefan Weitz, a director with Bing, explained to us, the technology understands the intent and context of each query because it looks at the user’s search history. For example, if a user typically searches for films and entertainment pieces, when he searches for “Australia,” Bing understands that he is probably not searching for the country. As a result, it would rank the 2008 movie above general information on Australia on the results page.

Weitz told us that Bing is not approaching personalization as a feature of search. Instead, the search engine believes that it shouldn’t be an option since people expect search results to be targeted and personalized to their needs.

“You should just think about personalized search as search,” he said.

While Bing is trying to make results more personal, it also wants to make sure users aren’t locked into the recently controversial “filter bubble.” This concept is essentially the concern that personalization would only return results that a searcher is familiar with and agrees with, and therefore not provide any diversity.

Although Bing takes this concern seriously, Weitz told us that it believes Adaptive Search offers a well-balanced approach for users.

“You can have personalization and serendipity, which is what really the filter bubble is saying doesn’t exist because of the personalization,” he said.

He went to say that Jamie Teevan of Microsoft Research studied this area extensively and found that personalization could actually help serendipity in some cases. According to him, the personalization of Adaptive Search is one step toward developing a human-like connection that search engines need, but have not yet been able to do.

Speaking of other search engines, there have been some that have suggested that Bing’s new approach is similar to Google’s previous query feature. Although Weitz said he has not been able to look at it closely, he did say his understanding is that it is based more on back-to-back queries. For example, if a user searches for a digital camera and the very next query he or she searches for is for Amazon, it is his understanding that Google would return Amazon’s search results for digital cameras.

Based on this inference, he said that Adaptive Search is “much broader… more complex from a computer science standpoint, but more elegant from a user standpoint.”

It’s interesting that this Adaptive Search announcement comes just after Google releases its new travel search engine, which is also similar to Bing Travel. When asked about this coincidence, Weitz made a humorous reference to the incident earlier this year when Google accused Bing of stealing their results.

“I think they’re using the same algorithm to copy our features, I guess,” he said laughingly.

Putting the humor aside, Weitz did tell us that Bing was pleased with its recent gain in market share. According to him, Bing realizes that it’s a long-term game but will continue to illustrate its commitment through new features and innovation.

“We want people to expect more from search, and if they expect more from search… we think we can actually grow the overall pie of queries that are out there, and hopefully, because we are the first to market with a lot of these innovative features, we can attract more people to those features because they are only on Bing,” he said.

“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.”
 
“Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the “filter bubble” it’s essentially the idea that content that we consume on the web is being filtered by the sites we use as a way of personalizing our experience and making it more relevant to us. It can reduce noise, but it also means we’re missing out on some things, and it is something of a controversial topic. We’ve discussed this more in depth in past articles, which you can find here.

Explaining how Adaptive Search works, the Bing representative tells us, “At the risk of generalizing, let’s say you’re a film fanatic and when you search for ‘Australia’ you aren’t likely searching for Australia the country. You’re probably searching for Australia the 2008 movie. Bing will take into account the fact you often search for movies and adapt the search page to show relevant movie results higher up on the page. This helps decrease your time spent searching and increases time spent buttering your popcorn.”

Here’s a video discussing Adaptive Search:

It’s rolling out over the next few days, but if you want to use it, you can just turn on your Search History and then search.

Do you want your search results and news tailored to your tastes, or do you want more control? Let us know in the comments.

The topic was brought up most recently by alternative search engine DuckDuckGo, which calls out the major search engines for being too heavy on the content filtering. DuckDuckGo has set up a site at DontBubble.us, which provides something of a graphical slideshow to illustrate its point. If you strip out all of the graphics and sub-text, it reads:

When you search the Internet, search engines now show different results to different people. Results are tailored to who you are, based on your search history and your click history. Since you often click on things you agree with, you keep getting more and more of what you already agree with, which means other stuff gets demoted (effectively filtered). This begs the question: what are you missing?

In other words, you are living in a Filter Bubble that promotes things it thinks you’ll like, and demotes (effectively filters) out some of the rest, which may limit your exposure to opposing information. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to pop your filter bubble, because the technology is used so much across the Internet.

Then it turns into an ad for DuckDuckGo:

We offer you an alternative: a search engine that breaks you out of your Filter Bubble by default, plus other differences like real privacy.

Founder Gabriel Weinberg discussed these differences with WebProNews in an interview earlier this year:

Of course, DuckDuckGo is not above some level of filtering. It’s already pre-filtered out results from sites like eHow, which many may applaud, but others may not appreciate. For all of the controversy that’s surrounded eHow, it also has its fans, and Demand Media, which owns it, claims to be taking action to make its quality better. The point is, there is some level of filtering going on, though this is more at the human level, than at the personalized algorithmic level.

The “Filter Bubble”

This “Filter Bubble” DuckDuckGo speaks of is a concept discussed by Eli Pariser in a recent TED Talk, which can be viewed here:

Pariser had some interesting things to say, speaking directly to executives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies, who were in the audience. In his presentation, he included a couple of interesting quotes – from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt:

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” – MZ

“It will very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.” – ES

Pariser talked about being a political progressive, but liking to hear what conservatives have to say, but noticing that all of the conservative posts had disappeared from his Facebook News Feed because Facebook had noticed he was clicking more on liberal links than conservative ones.

“Facebook isn’t the only place that’s doing this kind of invisible algorithmic editing of the web,” he said. “Google’s doing it too. If I search for something and you search for something even right now at the same time, we may get very different search results…There is no standard Google anymore.”

This is a fairly well-known fact, but that doesn’t make it any less of a nightmare for SEOs.

He talked about having several of his friends search for “Egypt” and send him screenshots of their results, only to find they were very different. One person didn’t even have any stories about the recent protests, and this was apparently while they were the “big story of the day”. He went on to note that many sites (mentioning the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Yahoo News) are engaging in some kind of personalized content delivery behavior

If you take all of these filters/algorithms together, you get a filter bubble, he says – your own personal unique bubble of info, which depends upon who you are and what you do, and “you don’t decide what gets in . You don’t actually see what gets edited out.”

He equates the phenomenon to the “passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones,” with the humans being traditional human news editors. If algorithms are going to curate the world and decide what to show us, he says, we need to make sure they’re not just keyed to relevance, but that they will also show us things that challenge us or make us uncomfortable – basically give us other points of view.

“We need you to give us some control,” he told the executives in the audience.

I might argue that we as users do have control. In the end, we’re choosing what services to use, what people or brands to follow, what publications to read, etc. If you’re limiting your content intake to what Facebook is showing you in the news feed, what Google is returning in search results, etc. then yes, you are succumbing to the algorithmic editors. He makes some great points.

However, in the end, it is still up to us humans to dictate how we go about consuming our information. Even Google and Facebook have ways that let us see what we want, in terms of news. You can use Google Reader, for example, and subscribe to every RSS feed your heart desires, and you can see every headline from every publication offering these feeds. It can be quite a task to get through all of your feeds, if you’re subscribed to too many, but you are still in control of how you consume that information. If you want conflicting view points, you can subscribe to both Fox News and MSNBC.

If Google is returning you MSNBC links for news searches, you can go to Fox News and search for the same topics there. And vice versa.

All of that said, it can certainly get more complex when you’re talking about non-news content, there’s a lot of gray area.

Google’s 57 Signals

He also says a Google engineer told him that Google has 57 signals that it looks at to personally tailor your query results. These signals, I presume, are a certain subset of the over 200 overall ranking signals Google employs with its algorithm. Pariser says the 57 includes things like what kind of computer you’re on, what browser you’re using, and where you’re located. Google doesn’t like to get into signal-naming too much, though it does let us know about certain ones from time to time.

René Pickhardt, a Webscience PHD student, took a crack at naming at least 40 of them. These are by no means confirmed by Google, but it’s an interesting compilation. It includes things like: search history, frequency of searches, age, sex, use of advanced search commands, etc.

In the end, there is simply a ridiculous amount of information at our disposal, being uploaded to the web every single second. The concept of the filter bubble charges that our access to all of this is limited by what the algorithmic gatekeepers think we should be seeing. On the flipside, these gatekeepers are tasked with providing the information they deem most relevant to our daily content consumption (and search) needs. By not employing such filtering, they could be said to be adding more noise. It’s a complex issue, on which opinions vary. It’s convenience vs. information overload.

What do you think? Should Google, Facebook and others be filtering results based on who we are? Share your thoughts.

Those of you familiar with the two bands will get the joke. Those of you who aren’t, don’t feel left out – the joke sucks.

But in all seriousness, Pandora’s like-recommendation engine has kept many a listener from recycling all the old stuff that they’re comfortable with. And now, Pandora is announcing that they are adding comedy to their personalized channel options.

Now available for your listening pleasure are over 10,000 clips from more than 700 comedians – with more being added as we speak. Adding comedy to the personalized channel mix had to be a long, but sometimes enjoyable process for the folks at Pandora. Here’s what they have to say about it on the Pandora blog:

Adding comedians to the mix has been one of the top requests from our listeners, so we’ve taken the same approach to comedy as we have to music: carefully and deliberately analyzing comedic “bits” across a very large number of attributes to capture the style, delivery and content of each performance. It’s been a very fun experience, taking what we’ve learned in music and applying it to a whole new category. Now, instead of talking about “minor keys,” “falsetto,” and “extensive vamping,” our comedy-analysts capture “odd juxtaposition” (A horse walks into a bar…), “misdirection” and “spoonerisms” (a well-boiled icicle, instead of a well-oiled bicycle)…

So, just like music, listeners can pick a starting point whether that be a specific comedian, genre, or specific joke. Young comedians will be linked to old greats like Cosby, Carlin and Pryor. It could really help young comedy lovers discover the people who influenced their current favorites.

Plus, this might in fact be the greatest thing to ever happen to road trips in the history of ever.

“It’ll be interesting when I find out who I’m paired up with,” said comedian Adam Carolla, whose material will be included in the service to the NYT. “I’m sure at some point someone will be insulted. There may be a lot of unintended comedy.”

The only shocking thing for me so far is that they were able to create a set of comedy “like” Louis C.K. – since he is the funniest person on the face of the planet. Since there aren’t multiple funniest persons on the planet, this seems odd to me. Go check him out now.

“It means that people are giving us a try, they’re finding a good experience, and they keep wanting to use it,” he said told us.

The increasing market share is likely a result of Bing’s continuous innovations. For instance, realizing the power of location and “deals,” Bing partnered with DealMap in an effort to bring the very best deals to users. Bing deals give users insight into what the best deals are and what deals are trending, all from one location.

Another initiative that Bing is working on is a new approach to personalization. In the past, personalization relied on collaborative filtering, which made determinations based on user preferences. For example, if person A and person B liked the same item, Bing could assume that person A would like other items that person B liked.

While this model has worked in some areas, it lacks efficiency in areas such as breaking news. As a result, Bing is working on Project Emporia, which is powered by its Matchbox technology. This new approach focuses on viewing the Web in the context of a collection of objects called “features,” instead of viewing it as a Web of pages.

“It’s a fundamentally, new approach to how we think about personalizing search and personalizing results,” said Weitz.

Bing is also working to improve social search. Search engines, previously, found it difficult to identify who users were and what their network of friends was. Now, however, social media behavior has helped them to understand these elements and tie them into search.

“Now, we’re able to actually bring that behavior that you do everyday in your normal life into search,” Weitz pointed out.

Although Bing is excited about its recent innovations and its growing market share, it doesn’t consider the other search engines to be losing the battle. Weitz believes that the developments in social search, mobile search, and personalization, actually “expand the pie” for everyone in the search game.

What are your thoughts on Bing’s progress and innovations in the search market? Does Bing have the potential to dominate search market share in the future?

Within the redesign is a new dashboard and what Google says are better ways to focus on wellness goals. "So our new re-design better organizes your medical information, while creating a more welcoming place to set goals for yourself and check in daily on your progress," explains Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown. "For example, you might want to set a goal around walking more each day or to lower your cholesterol over time. With our new design, you can easily monitor your path to success with a visual graph that shows your progress towards your personalized goal. You can even create custom trackers for other things that you want to monitor like daily sleep, exercise, pregnancy or even how many cups of coffee you drink a day."

Google has also integrated with new partners like Fitbit and CardioTrainer so users can collect data for tracking progress. "In the two weeks since CardioTrainer’s integration went live, CardioTrainer developer WorkSmart Labs reports that users have already uploaded more than 150,000 workouts to Google Health, where they can more easily view, track and set goals around their workouts and monitor them along with other health and wellness information," says Brown. 

The new design also enables users to take notes and keep journals on the progress of their health conditions or medications. 

In addition to all of this there are no more personalized content links, so users should be able to find more helpful information related to specific conditions, medications or lab results that relate to them. 

Meanwhile, Google is doing more to expand its reach into healthcare facilities. Google has formed partnerships most recently, with Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Sharp HealthCare.

That doesn’t include the white spaces work Google is doing. Yesterday, the company announced a partnership with the Hocking Valley Community Hospital in Logan, Ohio on the white spaces broadband deployment.

User Experience Researcher Hendrik Mueller has more about the new Google Health design here.

"Personalized Deals is the biggest thing we’ve done since we launched Groupon," the company says. "While Groupon won’t look much different, sending different deals to different users transforms Groupon in four big ways."

If you thought Groupon was getting big, this feature might be the ticket to making it a household name. Along with the launch of an Android app last week, Personalized Deals is likely going to put Groupon on a lot more people’s mobile devices.

As a result of the Personalized Deals feature, users will start getting offers from a growing number of businesses, which are tailored to their location, preferences, and buying patterns.

"Groupon has become so popular with merchants that we can’t keep up with demand," Groupon says. "Over 35,000 merchants are queued to be featured on Groupon, and with 97% of our merchants wanting to be featured again, that list is only going to get longer. As a response to unmet demand, Groupon has become one of the most prolifically copied websites in the history of the Internet, with over 500 worldwide Groupon knockoffs appearing in the last 12 months."

There’s no question that the Personalized Deals feature is going to continue to attract businesses to Groupon. Customers have more of a reason than ever to use the service.